How to extract the audio track from a Youtube FLV

As you might know, I like to listen to my mp3 player while going to and back from work. Nowadays Youtube is a rather used alternative system of information. Anyway watching a youtube video means that you have to stand in front of your computer doing nothing else than staring at the video and hopefully paying attention. That’s why I love the radio as a medium: it gives you almost as much information as the TV without the need of keeping you doing nothing else.  All right, sometimes the image is very powerful, more powerful than the language, but it is seldom like that.

Anyway, I have found two perfect way to extract the audio track of a youtube video, which is generally an mp3 stream:

1. Use the marvellous mplayer with the following line of command: mplayer -dumpaudio -dumpfile audiotrack.mp3 youryoutubefile.flv
2. Use VLC.

The second method took me a really long while to figure out. And as a matter of fact it doesn’t work with the GUI. In Windows, write a file with the following line (one line):

“C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe” %1 :sout=#transcode{acodec=mp3}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=raw,dst=%1.mp3},select=\”novideo\”} vlc://quit

save it as a bat file (or download this). Now if you drag a video.flv file on its icon, you’ll get a file named video.flv.mp3 with just the audio track of the flv file.

P.S. I download from youtube by keepvid.com